That makes sense to me. After all, my experiences strengthened my pro-choice stance, because it was no longer quite so hypothetical. Twice, I chose to have the babies, but it did put into sharp focus that I was very, very glad that I was making a choice, and not having that choice thrust upon me.
I’ve accompanied 6 women to have abortions (as you might guess, I’m the go-to gal in our community and for friends-of-friends who need a non-judgemental person to hold their hand and walk through the gauntlet of protesters with) and of the 5 I’m still in touch with, no one sees their abortion as a turning point in their life. Yes, it may have strengthened their resolve and made the matter less academic and more personal, but it isn’t viewed by any of them as “life changing.”
That’s not to say that they were all easy decisions. Some were, some weren’t. But they weren’t life changing decisions.
i mean, life changing in the respect that any major decision changes you. it may not change your mind or alter your life in any outwardly noticeable way. but when you make a decision with such heavy baggage thats attached to it. you cant possibly look at it the same way!
and, as far as i’m concerned, way to be a friend! good on ya!
That’s a phrase I won’t soon forget. Personally, I’m pro-life, probably rabidly-so in the eyes of the typical Doper, but engaging in debates about it seems fruitless, and depresses me. Perhaps I’ll have more zeal for the cause once Trump appoints another SCOTUS justice.
i disagree; a good hearty debate is the stuff of good citizenry!
if you are so rabid, what may i ask are you doing to eliminate the need for abortions, other than “just say, no”
encourage sex education, contraception, adoption rights, poverty control. all of these things have a better chance of ending abortion than standing on a street corner and calling your neighbors names.
even just rationally and calmly explaining your position is helpful!
I would replace your first axiom with
a) Liberals support the right to an abortion to those who want one.
Liberals in general aren’t in favor of abortion for itws own sake. With this in mind, I would be in favor of someone opening up a clinic in an urban area and offering them free abortions. I would view being able to control their reproduction as a boon to people of color. The ability to (if they choose) limit their family size to an amount that they can afford to support and as fits their life path, will help to empower them. What’s not to like.
Incentivising is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. As I said in general Liberals aren’t in favor of abortion for its own sake. So I would have to ask why they wanted to encourage abortion among those who would otherwise not want one, and the most obvious explanation is unsavory.
So I see no contradiction with respect to these views.
Can someone explain to me how allowing abortion in cases of rape would realistically work? Obviously it can’t work if the legal process must be completed first. Would an accusation be enough? If its just an accusation, how are we to know if the woman actually was raped or is simply using the only tools she has to get an abortion? I think this is just a ‘feel-good’ notion with no real-world application.
I took a look at your link. I didn’t look at them in any great detail none of the studies suggested seemed to be properly controlled. They all seemed to directly compare the psychological health of those people who have abortions with those that don’t without taking into account that the class of people for who find themselves in the position of needing an abortion might have very different life circumstances from those who do not need an abortion. And so may as a group be more prone to psycholgical issues whether or not they had an abortion.
Compare these to the studies cited by Whynot in which the psychological health of those who had an abortion were compared with the psychological health of those who sought and abortion and were denied access, which would seem to be the better comparison if the goal was to support the idea the abortion should be made illegal.
sorry about that, ditka, i shouldn’t have piled on you. i have no idea what you have or havent done in the past.
but, i stand by my stance on debate and action. there’s nothing wrong with saying how you feel about a topic, and following it up with constructive action (if youre so inclined.)
However, it should be said that I may have erected a straw man there. **Czarcasm **hasn’t clarified what he meant by “a major life-altering path” and how abortion influences that, or how we’d measure it. I offered one interpretation and refuted it, but it may not have been what **Czarcasm **meant.
I generally agree. This is one topic that I personally have a more difficult time keeping my temper in check when discussing. I tend to gravitate towards more polarizing language, and I’ve rarely had an experience where I felt that sharing my opinion on the matter was effective in changing someone else’s mind on the matter, so I tend to be more selective about who I engage with on the topic. Like I said, I find the topic depressing.
I’ve expended a fair bit of effort over the years to elect politicians that I think will nominate and confirm pro-life justices that will overturn Roe. I believe that single act (overturning Roe) would lead to a state of affairs that would curb the raw # of abortions in this country every year more than any reasonable amount of money or effort spent on sex education, contraception, adoption rights, or poverty control.
thank you for sharing, ditka, i understand your hesitancy and appreciate your restraint. i wish i could be more like that sometimes! it is indeed an emotional and sometimes frustrating debate.
i do hope, however, that you and your friends are unsuccessful at overturning Roe. we shall see.
I know. A significant portion of the country desperately wants to see it go, and a significant portion of the country desperately wants to see it stay.
The slut had her choice to make, she punishes herself. In the case of rape the girl didn’t, it’s a small concession to make to assure she at least gets to decide weather to keep it.
Nothing. See above.
Oh no! Being pregnant might kill me! No shit, if you’re high risk you should be managing that risk, but the odds are low. In the first world countries at least, and I’ve said time and again I accept the medical necessity argument. No one is trying to take your liberty, I reject the notion they are.
Pull the fucking tooth. It’s your tooth after all. Fuck, get pregnant, abort. Repeat it as many times as you please, but don’t pretend like youre not the reason that choice was necessary in the first place. I have no empathy for crying former mothers to be that put themselves in the situation that necessitated abortion.
ETA: I’m not singling you out btw, I grabbed a few responses and replied in reverse order. You happened to be three of them.
When I see studies based on less than 1000 respondents compared to a meta-study involving roughly two-thirds of a million respondents, I’ll take the meta-study, thank you very much. And that’s just one example.
Your positing issues with the methodology without evidential support (like, say, incidences of similar symptoms specifically by social class and also numbers of abortions by social class) isn’t compelling.
I notice that those NIH studies don’t appear to deal with social class at all.
Btw, that’s not my goal in the slightest. It’s to counter the myth that women have abortions out of convenience, a convenient (pun intended) way for pro-lifers to belittle the women so they don’t have to deal with such minor little details as attempting to force others to live the way they think is ‘proper’ based almost inevitably on their faith. It’s the same thinking that religious business owners use to rationalize denying service to gay people or whatever other group happens to offend their precious sensibilities.
One of my favorite Richard Dawkins quotes, given in an interview with Penn Jillette last year, in response to a question from the audience:
“I’m absolutely gobsmacked that anybody could seek to impose their own religious beliefs on others…it’s one thing to be privately Christian…and when they have the unutterable gall to imply that they are being oppressed because they’re not allowed to oppress other people…”
And this is exactly the attitude that I dislike the most. You don’t seem to have much empathy at all, full stop.
But you sure are quick to judge others’ life choices (of which I doubt you have the slightest understanding). I call it the High Horse Syndrome and, oddly enough, it seems the most prevalent among the fervently religious.
I am interested to know whether your principle here extends to any other scenarios where you would withdraw remedial solutions from people who suffer consequences of their earlier (possibly poor) choices?
Heart disease? Shouldn’t have eaten all those burgers. Please just die quietly.
Lung cancer? Shouldn’t have worked in that coalmine. What were you thinking?!
Hit by a car? Should have looked both ways more carefully before stepping out. No hospital for you - you put yourself in that situation.
Are those reasonable stances? Of course I don’t think they are - I constructed them specifically because they are awful and (I think) unreasonable, but what’s the difference between them and the topic? Is it the humanity of the fetus? If so, then make your argument about that - don’t dress it up as being about consequence of choice.
ETA: I may have been unfair - on re-reading, you’re not actually advocating withdrawal of any remedial solutions, just reserving your right to judge people. I guess that’s OK.
There is an actual (if not easy) solution to this impasse – the two sides work together to make sure that absolutely every woman has incredibly easy and free access to birth control, and every man has incredibly easy and free access to condoms (as well as development of a male “pill”), and we watch the unwanted pregnancy rate continue to go down, eventually (hopefully) getting close to zero.
In a lot of cases, *determining that a rape has occurred *is a lot easier, and quicker, than legally determining who did it and administering justice to them. So the accusation and legal processes are irrelevant, just a post-rape examination would suffice.
